It is all obvious or trivial except…

This is where Obamacare descends into lying scumbucket territory

With the first enrollment period barely off the ground, the Obama administration also has decided to delay enrollment for the second year of the program to give insurance companies more time to calculate rates, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

The delay will mean consumers will start shopping for insurance for Year Two of Obamacare on November 15, 2014 – more than a week after voters go to the polls for midterm elections, when congressional Democrats are expected to face tough questions about the policy they supported.

“That means that if premiums go through the roof in the first year of Obamacare, no one will know about it until after the election,” said Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa.

But Carney rejected any assertion that politics was behind the extension.

“The fact is, we’re doing it because it make sense for insurers to have as clear a sense of the pool of consumers they gain in the market this year, before setting rates for next year,” Carney said.

Sheesh. It’s so insulting to the American public that anyone thinks they will fall for this shit.

9 comments on “This is where Obamacare descends into lying scumbucket territory”

It’s insulting to those who didn’t vote for Obama. For those that did, he could come into their house, bone their daughter, and shoot the dog and they’d still be praising him to the heavens. It’s these idiots who have allowed this to happen.

The minute you start screwing with someone’s quality of live/living standard, you’ve got their undivided attention until the screwing has ceased. The political and chattering classes are used to keeping politics within the beltway. That can’t be done with Obamacare.

The proles are becoming engaged, and a good measure of just how engaged they are at any one moment can be gauged by who Democratic senators are doing and saying.

Note that yesterday Sen. Al Franken (MN) publicly stated that Obamacare may have to be delayed for another year. When you have as reliably liberal a dimwit as Franken starting to run for the hills, you can safely assume the peasants are revolting… it’s not like MN is a Republican stronghold.

What you are actually seeing is an administration, the political establishment and the news media in the throes of being unable to process the fact that the negative effects of Obamacare are immediate, concrete, largely immune to easy fixes and refusing to bend to the traditional news cycle. Obama can ‘pivot’ to other issues if he wants to, but doing so will avail him nothing.

What makes Obama’s latest ‘fix’ so pathetic is that for it to actually fool anyone, the insurance industry will willingly forego publicly warning the public of coming rate increases. They won’t, and indeed can’t. For one thing, they will refuse to take the fall for increases (what Obama wants), for another they will need to submit proposed increases to state insurance commissioners well in advance of November. That information will become public during the course of the approval process. If nothing else, this just shows what a bunch of lightweights we have in the White House.

I say “just barely” because, in fact, it will permit insurers to examine the utilization data for one whole additional month – October 2014 – when setting premiums for 2015.

Given the start-up enrollment fail, and the ramp-up time that is necessary for actual utilization to manifest itself following enrollment, it’s worthwhile to be able to look at a whole additional month of experience. Still, the insurers could set their premiums without it (they had no utilization or demographic data at all when setting 2014 premiums). So is it essential? No, it’s not.

Therefore I think this is “just barely” more than a brazen political dirty trick.

The individual mandate is what is supposed to prevent that death spiral. There’s just one thing: The individual mandate is legally unenforceable.

Yes, there is a penalty for failing to purchase insurance — starting at $95 or 1 percent of income the first year and rising sharply thereafter. But the designers of Obamacare went out of their way to prohibit the IRS from using its usual array of civil and criminal processes (fines, liens, etc.) to confiscate it. The government may only collect the penalty by deducting it from tax refunds — meaning people who prudently structure their tax withholding so that no refund accumulates can avoid paying with impunity.

This is something I couldn’t get my head around, without painful penalties on not having insurance, people simply won’t buy it until they need it.

> It’s so insulting to the American public that anyone thinks they will fall for this shit.

Tim, they reelected him after Benghazi. It wasn’t even close. It is now well established that they will fall for any old shit. That may be insulting to them, but it is sadly true. I have no idea why, but the great American public that once was is no longer.